VINCENT BUGLIOSI received his law degree in 1964. In his career at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, he successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including 21 murder convictions without a single loss. His most famous trial, the Charles Manson case, became the basis of his classic, Helter Skelter, the biggest selling true-crime book in publishing history. Two of Bugliosi’s other books—And the Sea Will Tell and Outrage —also reached #1 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. No other American true-crime writer has ever had more than one book that achieved this ranking. His Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been heralded as “epic” and “a book for the ages.” HBO, in association with Tom Hanks’s PlayTone Productions, will be producing this as an eight-hour mini-series in 2013, the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
Bugliosi has uncommonly attained success in two separate and distinct fields, as an author and a lawyer. His excellence as a trial lawyer is best captured in the judgment of his peers. “Bugliosi is as good a prosecutor as there ever was,” Alan Dershowitz says. “If you created a prosecutorial Hall of Fame, Vince would be in the entranceway.” F. Lee Bailey calls Bugliosi “the quintessential prosecutor.” “There is only one Vince Bugliosi. He’s the best,” says Robert Tanenbaum, for years the top homicide prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Most telling is the comment by Gerry Spence, who squared off against Bugliosi in a twenty-one-hour televised, scriptless “docu-trial” of Lee Harvey Oswald, in which the original key witnesses in the Kennedy assassination testified and were cross-examined. After the Dallas jury returned a guilty verdict in Bugliosi’s favor, Spence said, “No other lawyer in America could have done what Vince did in this case.”
Bugliosi lives with his wife, Gail, in Los Angeles.